My PhD Research
September 2021 to Present
- © Dominique G. Maucieri
in Bamfield (Canada) a- © Valesca de Groot
For my PhD I am working in the Bates Lab at the University of Victoria, examining how heat, hunger and habitat loss affect marine invertebrate communities. My research integrates fieldwork, experiments, and the analysis of large-scale ecological datasets to understand how climate change and anthropogenic disturbance are reshaping marine invertebrate communities. I am particularly interested in how habitat loss and food limitation interact with rising temperatures to influence organismal energetics, physiology, and ultimately ecosystem functioning. These questions are central to predicting biodiversity shifts and informing conservation strategies in our changing oceans.
My first chapter is already published in Diversity and Distributions (here) and examines the effect of temperature and habitat loss across both space and time on marine invertebrate communities using a long-term data set from the Channel Islands in Southern California.
My second chapter uses Reef Life Survey Data to examine the effect of fish consumption on changes in marine invertebrate abundance during a major marine heatwave in Australia.
My third chapter involved a collaboration with the Hakai's Marna Lab Team on Quadra Island. I performed a set of experiments using Dermasterias imbricata aka Leather sea stars, to examine if access to food is able to mitigate the negative effects of thermal stress. These experiments have finished an I am in the final stages of writing this manuscript. Stay tuned for this manuscript.